Upcycled Theorems in New Hall

by Roland Minton on December 22, 2015

If you think that math and art are opposites, you will be surprised by Upcycled Theorems, the gallery created by Jan Minton’s “Mathematics and Art” class, HNRS 301. A wide range of connections between math and art are explored in this course. The students demonstrated three of them in an open house in New Hall on December 10.

Guests were invited to find the symmetries in china patterns to classify the designs on various teacups. The classification scheme is also used in crystallography.

The gallery in the New Hall classroom, titled Upcycled Theorems, is based on work by Crockett Johnson that illustrates important mathematical results of a geometric nature. The slope of a curve, a fundamental result in calculus, is demonstrated in the two pieces shown in the picture above.

A fun, and mostly musical, concert was given by the Palm Pipe Orchestra. The students used theories of harmonious notes that date back to Pythagoras to determine the exact lengths to cut sections of PVC pipe to produce particular notes. A video of one of their songs will be posted next.